[Maps-l] OSM and the Toolserver

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 hi, i'm the senior Unix administrator for the Toolserver project. i'm mostly involved in the WMF side, and i haven't done much with the OSM stuff. however, i have been observing the progress of the OSM Toolserver (cassini), since that is ostensibly part of the Toolserver cluster, and i have a few concerns. firstly, i'd like to see proper integration between the OSM and WMF parts of the Toolserver. for example, someone has configured a web server on cassini, and people are already deploying tools at <http://cassini.toolserver.org/~username/>. it should be clear why using "cassini.toolserver.org" in a URL is a bad idea; but i don't see why cassini needs to host user tools at all. the Toolserver already has a web server which works quite well, and has plenty of spare resources. by putting OSM user tools there, we can combine resources and make efficient use of them; if/when the web server is full, we can add additional resources and both WMF and OSM users will immediately be able to take advantage of them. (i understand OSM needs some special Apache module for serving tiles; keeping that on cassini probably makes sense.) it's also not clear to me whether cassini needs to be a login server at all; the WMF databases at the TS don't allow user login, and users connect to them remotely. is there something special about OSM tools that prevents them from running on the existing TS login servers? secondly, in the rush to deploy cassini as quickly as possible, it seems that little planning has been done. one thing we've learnt from the Toolserver is that it's a lot less effort to plan things properly from the start, instead of deploying something, then discovering it has to be redone later. might i suggest that people take a step back, consider what exactly the "OSM Toolserver" is meant to be, and come up a plan before going any further? - river.